To “Encourage and Uplift”: Entrepreneurial Uplift Cinema

This chapter looks at early motion picture entrepreneurs working in northern cities. Along with George W. Broome and Louis B. Anderson, filmmakers such as Hunter C. Haynes in New York and Peter P. Jones, Arthur Anderson, and William Foster in Chicago engaged in various moving picture ventures, producing both fiction and nonfiction films. This chapter discusses how these entrepreneurs engaged with the uplift project through their filmmaking, and how their work operated discursively in the promotion of Black modernity through cinema. Tracing the rhetorical and social effects achieved by these entrepreneurial films, this chapter explores the intersections forged by Black filmmaking entrepreneurs with the broader film industry and the possibilities—both attempted and actualized—for African American professional advancement behind the moving picture camera.